Final Fridays (13 page)

I was sufficiently impressed—and the university was sufficiently well funded in those Lyndon Johnson/Nelson Rockefeller years—to write soon after to Signor Calvino at his Paris address, inviting him to visit Buffalo as Señor Borges had recently done, also at my eager invitation. Indeed, I urged Calvino to be my professorial replacement for a semester or even a whole academic year. At that time I was the lucky sitter in a brand-new and peculiarly endowed professorial chair whose generous income I was not permitted to draw as additional salary, but
was
allowed to use to hire a visiting writer to replace me from time to time. The first of these eminent succedanea had been Donald Barthelme; I much wanted the second to be Italo Calvino. In due time I received a cordial reply—in Italian, which I gathered (and a bilingual colleague confirmed) to say that while Calvino was gratified by the invitation, he was not yet confident enough of his English to preside over a “creative writing” course at our university. Such enterprises were and are, of course, quite foreign to our European brethren. My enthusiasm for Calvino's fiction, however, was sufficiently shared by others at that lively place in that lively time (imagine having Don Barthelme and Michel Foucault as simultaneously visiting professors, as we did in Buffalo in 1972) to inspire the drama department to mount a charming stage adaptation of
Cosmicomics
in honor of the author; and having made each other's epistolary
acquaintance, Calvino and I exchanged books and occasional letters thereafter. He sent me
Invisible Cities
and the
Tarots
, both of which I found wonderfully good; I sent him
Lost in the Funhouse
and
Chimera
.

A few years later, in 1976, I was able to re-extend my come-visit invitation, this time from Johns Hopkins, whereto I had moved and wherefrom we contrived to extract some special funding for distinguished visitors in connection with the university's centennial festivities. And this time, to our interdepartmental delight, Calvino accepted. Indeed, he accepted in English, declaring that he now felt confident enough in our language to give the thing a brief try. And at the close of his letter of acceptance I was charmed by . . .
Friendly yours
.

In the event, he was with us in Baltimore for about two weeks in March of that year: a dapper, courteous, reserved but entirely cordial fellow whose alert, rather intense mien reminded me of a sharp-eyed bird's. To my apprentice fiction-writers he read his essay on fiction as an
ars combinatoria
within a closed field. To the university's Italian community he lectured in Italian on Manzoni's
I Promessi Sposi
(but he politely declined an invitation from the Italian consulate in Baltimore to attend a reception there in his honor, on the grounds that he was visiting as a writer, not as a
paisano
). To the university community at large he gave a public reading from
Cosmicomics
,
T-Zero
, and
Invisible Cities
, which my wife and I remember with particular warmth despite the strain of his fallible and often hesitant English. I had let Calvino know, earlier, that his fiction had been among my courtship materials in the wooing of my bride—especially the lovely closing story from
Cosmicomics
, called “The Spiral”—and in acknowledgment of his unwitting role as our
Galeoto
, he included that story in his program, dedicating it to us. Finally, to our literature
students and faculty he gave a delightful talk in English on his adventures with the Tarot cards, illustrating his remarks with the deck itself. A student of mine from those days remembers his accidentally dropping the whole pack in mid-demonstration; I myself cannot imagine Italo Calvino ever dropping a card or missing a trick—and sure enough, when I recently reviewed the videotapes of that occasion, I was gratified to see vindicated both my memory and Calvino's manual dexterity.

Of that too-brief Baltimore sojourn I recall little else. We pointed out to Calvino our city's funky Bromo-Seltzer Building, which Baltimoreans declare to resemble a Sienese tower. Calvino politely opined that it did not look remarkably Sienese to him, even without the giant blue trademark bottle that used to crown its clock (with the letters B-R-O-M-O-S-E-L-T-Z-E-R instead of numerals). We showed him a particularly bleak nighttime stretch of featureless East Baltimore rowhouses, their cornices lined with hundreds of chattering starlings; to me the scene looked very like de Chirico, but Calvino, delighted with it, said, “It's all Edward Hopper!” Both impressions, I think, are defensible. Off he presently went to join his wife up in New York City, which he loved, then down with her to Mexico City, which he didn't love (although he much admired the smaller towns and the Mexican countryside, and was an avid collector of pre-Columbian artifacts), and then back to his home turf, the Paris/Torino axis along which he regularly commuted in those days. We continued to exchange books and occasional letters (such a lover of “lightness” and “quickness” cannot have admired my enormous novel called
LETTERS
, which I sent him in 1979, although I'm confident he would have approved its formal design). My wife and I looked forward to a reunion with him and Mrs. Calvino during his
Norton lectureship at Harvard in 1985/86: a reunion and a lectureship that, alas, never came to pass.

Two final reminiscences, and then on with the story. Just a week or so after the news reached us of Italo's death on September 19, 1985, Umberto Eco happened to be our guest at Johns Hopkins, and of course we spoke of our mutual lost friend (a much closer friend of Eco's, to be sure; Calvino had been Eco's “chaperon,” as Eco himself put it, for the Strega Prize). He had it on good authority, Eco told me, that despite the damage of the massive stroke that had felled Calvino a fortnight earlier, the man managed to utter, as perhaps his final words, “
I paralleli! I paralleli!”
(“The parallels! The parallels!”). Kindly perpend that wonderful exit-line, to which I shall shortly return.

A year or so later, Esther (“Chichita”) Calvino telephoned to ask whom I might recommend to write a foreword to the Harvard University Press's forthcoming publication of her husband's never-delivered Norton lectures,
Six Memos for the Next Millennium
. Promptly and warmly I recommended myself for that melancholy last rite, but she explained that the Press was insisting on the introducer's being someone from the Harvard community. On that I drew a blank, and in the event she wrote the touching and altogether admirable foreword herself—the first of several that she has since written for posthumous editions of her husband's work.

In those five lovely
Memo
lectures—“Lightness,” “Quickness,” “Exactitude,” “Visibility,” and “Multiplicity”
³
—Calvino voices several times his admiration for Jorge Luis Borges, an admiration that he and I had shared in our Baltimore conversations. The story-series
Lost in the Funhouse
, I had told Calvino, was my attempt to assimilate my encounter with Borges's narrative imagination; the
T-Zero
collection, Calvino had replied, was his endeavor to do likewise. If parallel lines can be bent non-Euclideanly back upon themselves, I shall circle now back to this lecture's starting-place and draw a few
paralleli
—also some anti-
paralleli
—between the fiction of those two superb writers, who were born a quarter-century apart (both, as it happens, in Latin America) but who died, alas for literature, within nine months of each other (both as it happens, in Europe).

 

FIRST, SOME NOT particularly literary
paralleli.
The two gentlemen shared that dignified, polite, even somewhat courtly but altogether approachable and good-humored sociability that I mentioned earlier; nothing in the least rowdy, “bohemian,” or as some might say, re-demptively vulgar about either of them, at least in my limited experience of their company. Compared for example to Vladimir Nabokov, Gore Vidal, or John Gardner (to name three very dissimilar antitypes), both Borges and Calvino were nonbelligerent with respect to their fellow writers. I note with some envy that Calvino's fiction in particular—rather like García Márquez's, but perhaps a touch less than Borges's—is mutually admired by writers who might agree on very little else. Vidal, Gardner, Mary McCarthy, John Updike (whom I have the honor of having introduced to Calvino's fiction)—all are or were warm
Calvinistas
along with us alleged Postmodernists, even though Mr. Vidal, in my opinion, gets things wrong even when singing the writer's praises, which characteristically he cannot do without disparaging other of his contemporaries. Borges and Calvino shared moreover not only their Latin American nativity—Calvino was born in Cuba, where his father was doing agronomical work in 1923—but also a specifically Argentine connection: Borges was born in Buenos Aires and lived most of his life in that city; Esther Judith
Singer Calvino was likewise born in Buenos Aires, but spent most of her adult life in Europe—an Italian citizen living and working in Paris as a translator until the Calvinos resettled in Rome. Borges, it occurs to me to mention, declared himself pleased to have a Jewish component in his ancestry (not a very direct one, it turns out, though a consequential: One of his English grandmother's sisters married an Italian-Jewish engineer who immigrated to Argentina with his bride and with Borges's grandmother-to-be), and he said that only once did he break his own rule against political writing: He wrote two pro-Israel poems at the time of the Six-Day War. A fair number of his stories deal with explicitly Jewish themes and characters—“The Aleph,” “Deutsches Requiem,” “Emma Zunz,” and “The Secret Miracle,” among others—and in conversation he once gently corrected my mispronunciation of the word
Kabbalah
. To the best of my recollection, Calvino's Jewish connection nowhere surfaces in his fiction; perhaps his wife wasn't particularly interested in that aspect of her ethnicity, or perhaps Italo wasn't. His double Latino connection, on the other hand, notably does surface from time to time—for example in the wonderful story “The Jaguar Sun”—but its contexts are typically more Central American than Argentinean, distinctly removed from Borges's pampas and
milongas
and Buenos Airean suburbs. In Calvino's early story specifically entitled “The Argentine Ant,” the setting and the characters are thoroughly Italian; only the eponymous ants are said to “come from South America.”

It is Italy, of course, that plays the role in Calvino's fiction that Argentina plays in Borges's, and we note at once another parallel: While both writers draw strongly and eloquently upon their respective national cultures, the literary orientation of both is decidedly more international than regional, in their aesthetics as well as their
subject matter. Borges was a lifelong Anglophile with a passion for
Beowulf
and a particular fondness for the England of Robert Louis Stevenson, G. K. Chesterton, and H. G. Wells, but his literary acquaintance was encyclopedic. Calvino valued highly his extended residence in Paris and his association with Raymond Queneau's OULIPO group (
L'Ouvoir de la litterature potentielle
, to which I'll circle back presently); while he wrote knowledgeably about Italian literature from various periods, his most strongly felt affinities (after the comic books and Hollywood movies of his youth) were with Italian folktales, the
novellini
, and such ingeniously structured tale-cycles as Boccaccio's
Decameron
. Both writers, I'm happy to point out, shared my fondness for Scheherazade and company. In Calvino's case, rather more than in Borges's though not more than in mine, this fondness extended to tale-cycles and narrative framing devices in general; in our final literary exchange, in 1984, I sent Calvino a half-serious essay of mine on Scheherazade's menstrual cycle as a key to
The 1001 Nights
,
⁴
and he sent me his 1982 essay in
La Repubblica
on Nezami's medieval Persian tale-cycle
The Seven Princesses
.

This “internationalism” caused Borges to be criticized at home for being not Argentinean enough in his literary preoccupations: a criticism which Borges quietly devastates in his essay “The Argentine Writer and Tradition.” I doubt that Calvino was ever criticized for being insufficiently Italian, but I recall being told by an Italian colleague that his earlier, realistic works were knocked by the local Catholic critics for being too sympathetic to the Communists, and that his later, fabulistic fictions were knocked by the Communist critics for their abandonment of socialist realism. Although Calvino came to describe himself as a “political agnostic,” he maintained a lively interest in the Italian political scene and wrote scathingly of the
assassination of Aldo Moro. Borges was by temperament apolitical, although he despised Perón and got himself into hot water with many of his Latino literary comrades by welcoming the junta that displaced Perón and by accepting a Chilean literary award from the bloody hands of General Pinochet himself. He even permitted himself on that latter occasion some unfortunate disparagements of democratic government: as embarrassing though not incomprehensible a lapse, in its way, as García Márquez's buddyhood with Fidel Castro, which inspired the Romanian-American writer André Codrescu to remark that one can be simultaneously a great artist and a political idiot.

In sum, sort of, both Borges and Calvino were men of formidable literary sophistication who wore their learning lightly in conversation as well as in their art; unabashed “intellectuals” who were never pedantic or snobbish in their intellectuality (as their great peer Nabokov decidedly sometimes was). Before we leave these relatively personal for more strictly literary
paralleli
, I suppose it might be noted that both men's youthful lives were marked by a discreet, respectful ambivalence toward their fathers. Borges writes touchingly about his (and his military forebears) in the mini-memoir “An Autobiographical Essay”; Calvino likewise in
his
mini-memoir “The Road to San Giovanni.” Both to some extent felt themselves to be letting the old man down in their pursuit of (in Borges's case) purely bookish interests and values or (in Calvino's) nonscientific ones; and both maintained a distanced fascination with what they had “rejected”: swords, knives, and military history for Borges, the physical and natural sciences (but not agronomy) for Calvino. By way of anti-
paralleli
, before we move on: In part but surely not entirely because of his increasing blindness, Borges remained very much his mother's son during her long life and his long bachelorhood, which ended (the bachelorhood) only at age
68, when his then quite old mother felt unable to accompany him to Cambridge for the Norton lectureship. That late marriage lasted scarcely longer than Harvard's academic year; when
Madre
Borges succumbed in her mid-90s, Jorge Luis was admirably managed by his all-purpose assistant Maria Kodama, whom he married shortly before his death in Geneva at age 86. What Calvino's connection with his mother was, I have no idea (she scarcely figures in the “San Giovanni” memoir, although its author acknowledges that with “silent authority” she “looks out from between the lines”). On the evidence, however, he was altogether a more physically and psychologically independent fellow: a youthful veteran of the antifascist partisan resistance in World War II, a loving husband and father who wrote with amused affection of his domestic life—in the pretty essay “La Poubelle Agréé,”
⁵
for example, as well as in his letters. Perhaps that is why, to some of us at least, Calvino's fiction surpasses that of Borges in warmth and emotional range, if not in virtuosity and profundity.